by Alex Haley
He asked what kind of work I had done. I told him that I’d washed restaurant dishes in Mason, Michigan. He nearly dropped the powder can. “My homeboy! Man, gimme some skin! I’m from Lansing!”
I never told Shorty—and he never suspected—that he was about ten years older than I. He took us to be about the same age. At first I would have been embarrassed to tell him, later I just never bothered. Shorty had dropped out of first-year high school in Lansing, lived a while with an uncle and aunt in Detroit, and had spent the last six years living with his cousin in Roxbury. But when I mentioned the names of Lansing people and places, he remembered many, and pretty soon we sounded as if we had been raised in the same block. I could sense Shorty’s genuine gladness, and I don’t have to say how lucky I felt to find a friend as hip as he obviously was.
“Man, this is a swinging town if you dig it,” Shorty said. “You’re my homeboy—I’m going to school you to the happenings.” I stood there and grinned like a fool. “You got to go anywhere now? Well, stick around until I get off.”
One thing I liked immediately about Shorty was his frankness. When I told him where I lived, he said what I already knew—that nobody in town could stand the Hill Negroes. But he thought a sister who gave me a “pad,” not charging me rent, not even running me out to find “some slave,” couldn’t be all bad. Shorty’s slave in the poolroom, he said, was just to keep ends together while he learned his horn. A couple of years before, he’d hit the numbers and bought a saxophone. “Got it right in there in the closet now, for my lesson tonight.” Shorty was taking lessons “with some other studs,” and he intended one day to organize his own small band. “There’s a lot of bread to be made gigging right around here in Roxbury,” Shorty explained to me. “I don’t dig joining some big band, one-nighting all over just to say I played with Count or Duke or somebody.” I thought that was smart. I wished I had studied a horn; but I never had been exposed to one.
All afternoon, between trips up front to rack balls, Shorty talked to me out of the corner of his mouth: which hustlers—standing around, or playing at this or that table—sold “reefers,” or had just come out of prison, or were “second-story men.” Shorty told me that he played at least a dollar a day on the numbers. He said as soon as he hit a number, he would use the winnings to organize his band.
I was ashamed to have to admit that I had never played the numbers. “Well, you ain’t never had nothing to play with,” he said, excusing me, “but you start when you get a slave, and if you hit, you got a stake for something.”
He pointed out some gamblers and some pimps. Some of them had white whores, he whispered. “I ain’t going to lie—I dig them two-dollar white chicks,” Shorty said. “There’s a lot of that action around here, nights: you’ll see it.” I said I already had seen some. “You ever had one?” he asked.
My embarrassment at my inexperience showed. “Hell, man,” he said, “don’t be ashamed. I had a few before I left Lansing—them Polack chicks that used to come over the bridge. Here, they’re mostly Italians and Irish. But it don’t matter what kind, they’re something else! Ain’t no different nowhere—there’s nothing they love better than a black stud.”
Through the afternoon, Shorty introduced me to players and loungers. “My homeboy,” he’d say, “he’s looking for a slave if you hear anything.” They all said they’d look out.
At seven o’clock, when the night ball-racker came on, Shorty told me he had to hurry to his saxophone lesson. But before he left, he held out to me the six or seven dollars he had collected that day in nickel and dime tips. “You got enough bread, homeboy?”
I was okay, I told him—I had two dollars. But Shorty made me take three more. “Little fattening for your pocket,” he said. Before we went out, he opened his saxophone case and showed me the horn. It was gleaming brass against the green velvet, an alto sax. He said, “Keep cool, homeboy, and come back tomorrow. Some of the cats will turn you up a slave.”
When I got home, Ella said there had been a telephone call from somebody named Shorty. He had left a message that over at the Roseland State Ballroom, the shoeshine boy was quitting that night, and Shorty had told him to hold the job for me.
“Malcolm, you haven’t had any experience shining shoes,” Ella said. Her expression and tone of voice told me she wasn’t happy about my taking that job. I didn’t particularly care, because I was already speechless thinking about being somewhere close to the greatest bands in the world. I didn’t even wait to eat any dinner.
The ballroom was all lighted when I got there. A man at the front door was letting in members of Benny Goodman’s band. I told him I wanted to see the shoeshine boy, Freddie.
“You’re going to be the new one?” he asked. I said I thought I was, and he laughed, “Well, maybe you’ll hit the numbers and get a Cadillac, too.” He told me that I’d find Freddie upstairs in the men’s room on the second floor.
But downstairs before I went up, I stepped over and snatched a glimpse inside the ballroom. I just couldn’t believe the size of that waxed floor! At the far end, under the soft, rose-colored lights, was the bandstand with the Benny Goodman musicians moving around, laughing and talking, arranging their horns and stands.
A wiry, brown-skinned, conked fellow upstairs in the men’s room greeted me. “You Shorty’s homeboy?” I said I was, and he said he was Freddie. “Good old boy,” he said. “He called me, he just heard I hit the big number, and he figured right I’d be quitting.” I told Freddie what the man at the front door had said about a Cadillac. He laughed and said, “Burns them white cats up when you get yourself something. Yeah, I told them I was going to get me one—just to bug them.”
Freddie then said for me to pay close attention, that he was going to be busy and for me to watch but not get in the way, and he’d try to get me ready to take over at the next dance, a couple of nights later.
As Freddie busied himself setting up the shoeshine stand, he told me, “Get here early…your shoeshine rags and brushes by this footstand…your polish bottles, paste wax, suede brushes over here…everything in place, you get rushed, you never need to waste motion….”
While you shined shoes, I learned, you also kept watch on customers inside, leaving the urinals. You darted over and offered a small white hand towel. “A lot of cats who ain’t planning to wash their hands, sometimes you can run up with a towel and shame them. Your towels are really your best hustle in here. Cost you a penny apiece to launder—you always get at least a nickel tip.”
The shoeshine customers, and any from the inside rest room who took a towel, you whiskbroomed a couple of licks. “A nickel or a dime tip, just give ‘em that,” Freddie said. “But for two bits, Uncle Tom a little—white cats especially like that. I’ve had them to come back two, three times a dance.”
From down below, the sound of the music had begun floating up. I guess I stood transfixed. “You never seen a big dance?” asked Freddie. “Run on awhile, and watch.”
There were a few couples already dancing under the rose-colored lights. But even more exciting to me was the crowd thronging in. The most glamorous-looking white women I’d ever seen—young ones, old ones, white cats buying tickets at the window, sticking big wads of green bills back into their pockets, checking the women’s coats, and taking their arms and squiring them inside.
Freddie had some early customers when I got back upstairs. Between the shoeshine stand and thrusting towels to me just as they approached the wash basin, Freddie seemed to be doing four things at once. “Here, you can take over the whiskbroom,” he said, “just two or three licks—but let ‘em feel it.”
When things slowed a little, he said, “You ain’t seen nothing tonight. You wait until you see a spooks’ dance! Man, our people carry on!” Whenever he had a moment, he kept schooling me. “Shoelaces, this drawer here. You just starting out, I’m going to make these to you as a present. Buy them for a nickel a pair, tell cats they need laces if they do, and charge two bits.”
&n
bsp; Every Benny Goodman record I’d ever heard in my life, it seemed, was filtering faintly into where we were. During another customer lull, Freddie let me slip back outside again to listen. Peggy Lee was at the mike singing. Beautiful! She had just joined the band and she was from North Dakota and had been singing with a group in Chicago when Mrs. Benny Goodman discovered her, we had heard some customers say. She finished the song and the crowd burst into applause. She was a big hit.
“It knocked me out, too, when I first broke in here,” Freddie said, grinning, when I went back in there. “But, look, you ever shined any shoes?” He laughed when I said I hadn’t, excepting my own. “Well, let’s get to work. I never had neither.” Freddie got on the stand and went to work on his own shoes. Brush, liquid polish, brush, paste wax, shine rag, lacquer sole dressing…step by step, Freddie showed me what to do.
“But you got to get a whole lot faster. You can’t waste time!” Freddie showed me how fast on my own shoes. Then, because business was tapering off, he had time to give me a demonstration of how to make the shine rag pop like a firecracker. “Dig the action?” he asked. He did it in slow motion. I got down and tried it on his shoes. I had the principle of it. “Just got to do it faster,” Freddie said. “It’s a jive noise, that’s all. Cats tip better, they figure you’re knocking yourself out!”
By the end of the dance, Freddie had let me shine the shoes of three or four stray drunks he talked into having shines, and I had practiced picking up my speed on Freddie’s shoes until they looked like mirrors. After we had helped the janitors to clean up the ballroom after the dance, throwing out all the paper and cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles, Freddie was nice enough to drive me all the way home to Ella’s on the Hill in the second-hand maroon Buick he said he was going to trade in on his Cadillac. He talked to me all the way. “I guess it’s all right if I tell you, pick up a couple of dozen packs of rubbers, two-bits apiece. You notice some of those cats that came up to me around the end of the dance? Well, when some have new chicks going right, they’ll come asking you for rubbers. Charge a dollar, generally you’ll get an extra tip.”
He looked across at me. “Some hustles you’re too new for. Cats will ask you for liquor, some will want reefers. But you don’t need to have nothing except rubbers—until you can dig who’s a cop.”
“You can make ten, twelve dollars a dance for yourself if you work everything right,” Freddie said, before I got out of the car in front of Ella’s. “The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle. So long, Red.”
The next time I ran into Freddie I was downtown one night a few weeks later. He was parked in his pearl gray Cadillac, sharp as a tack, “cooling it.”
“Man, you sure schooled me!” I said, and he laughed; he knew what I meant. It hadn’t taken me long on the job to find out that Freddie had done less shoeshining and towel-hustling than selling liquor and reefers, and putting white “Johns” in touch with Negro whores. I also learned that white girls always flocked to the Negro dances—some of them whores whose pimps brought them to mix business and pleasure, others who came with their black boy friends, and some who came in alone, for a little freelance lusting among a plentiful availability of enthusiastic Negro men.
At the white dances, of course, nothing black was allowed, and that’s where the black whores’ pimps soon showed a new shoeshine boy what he could pick up on the side by slipping a phone number or address to the white Johns who came around the end of the dance looking for “black chicks.”
—
Most of Roseland’s dances were for whites only, and they had white bands only. But the only white band ever to play there at a Negro dance, to my recollection, was Charlie Barnet’s. The fact is that very few white bands could have satisfied the Negro dancers. But I know that Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee” and his “Redskin Rhumba” drove those Negroes wild. They’d jampack that ballroom, the black girls in way-out silk and satin dresses and shoes, their hair done in all kinds of styles, the men sharp in their zoot suits and crazy conks, and everybody grinning and greased and gassed.
Some of the bandsmen would come up to the men’s room at about eight o’clock and get shoeshines before they went to work. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Jimmie Lunceford were just a few of those who sat in my chair. I would really make my shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers. Duke’s great alto saxman, Johnny Hodges—he was Shorty’s idol—still owes me for a shoeshine I gave him. He was in the chair one night, having a friendly argument with the drummer, Sonny Greer, who was standing there, when I tapped the bottom of his shoes to signal that I was finished. Hodges stepped down, reaching his hand in his pocket to pay me, but then snatched his hand out to gesture, and just forgot me, and walked away. I wouldn’t have dared to bother the man who could do what he did with “Daydream” by asking him for fifteen cents.
I remember that I struck up a little shoeshine-stand conversation with Count Basie’s great blues singer, Jimmie Rushing. (He’s the one famous for “Sent For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today” and things like that.) Rushing’s feet, I remember, were big and funny-shaped—not long like most big feet, but they were round and roly-poly like Rushing. Anyhow, he even introduced me to some of the other Basie cats, like Lester Young, Harry Edison, Buddy Tate, Don Byas, Dickie Wells, and Buck Clayton. They’d walk in the rest room later, by themselves. “Hi, Red.” They’d be up there in my chair, and my shine rag was popping to the beat of all of their records, spinning in my head. Musicians never have had, anywhere, a greater shoeshine-boy fan than I was. I would write to Wilfred and Hilda and Philbert and Reginald back in Lansing, trying to describe it.
—
I never got any decent tips until the middle of the Negro dances, which is when the dancers started feeling good and getting generous. After the white dances, when I helped to clean out the ballroom, we would throw out perhaps a dozen empty liquor bottles. But after the Negro dances, we would have to throw out cartons full of empty fifth bottles—not rotgut, either, but the best brands, and especially Scotch.
During lulls up there in the men’s room, sometimes I’d get in five minutes of watching the dancing. The white people danced as though somebody had trained them—left, one, two; right, three, four—the same steps and patterns over and over, as though somebody had wound them up. But those Negroes—nobody in the world could have choreographed the way they did whatever they felt—just grabbing partners, even the white chicks who came to the Negro dances. And my black brethren today may hate me for saying it, but a lot of black girls nearly got run over by some of those Negro males scrambling to get at those white women; you would have thought God had lowered some of his angels. Times have sure changed, if it happened today, those same black girls would go after those Negro men—and the white women, too.
Anyway, some couples were so abandoned—flinging high and wide, improvising steps and movements—that you couldn’t believe it. I could feel the beat in my bones, even though I had never danced.
“Showtime!” people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low white sneakers. The band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers, would be making the Roseland Ballroom feel like a big, rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad. “Wail, man, wail!” people would be shouting at the band; and it would be wailing, until first one and then another couple just ran out of strength and stumbled off toward the crowd, exhausted and soaked with sweat. Sometimes I would be down there standing inside the door jumping up and down in my gray jacket with the whiskbroom in the pocket, and the manager would have to come and shout at me that I had customers upstairs
.
The first liquor I drank, my first cigarettes, even my first reefers, I can’t specifically remember. But I know they were all mixed together with my first shooting craps, playing cards, and betting my dollar a day on the numbers, as I started hanging out at night with Shorty and his friends. Shorty’s jokes about how country I had been made us all laugh. I still was country, I know now, but it all felt so great because I was accepted. All of us would be in somebody’s place, usually one of the girls’, and we’d be turning on, the reefers making everybody’s head light, or the whisky aglow in our middles. Everybody understood that my head had to stay kinky a while longer, to grow long enough for Shorty to conk it for me. One of these nights, I remarked that I had saved about half enough to get a zoot.
“Save?” Shorty couldn’t believe it. “Homeboy, you never heard of credit?” He told me he’d call a neighborhood clothing store the first thing in the morning, and that I should be there early.
A salesman, a young Jew, met me when I came in. “You’re Shorty’s friend?” I said I was; it amazed me—all of Shorty’s contacts. The salesman wrote my name on a form, and the Roseland as where I worked, and Ella’s address as where I lived. Shorty’s name was put down as recommending me. The salesman said, “Shorty’s one of our best customers.”
I was measured, and the young salesman picked off a rack a zoot suit that was just wild: sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee and angle-narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees.
As a gift, the salesman said, the store would give me a narrow leather belt with my initial “L” on it. Then he said I ought to also buy a hat, and I did—blue, with a feather in the four-inch brim. Then the store gave me another present: a long, thick-linked, gold-plated chain that swung down lower than my coat hem. I was sold forever on credit.
When I modeled the zoot for Ella, she took a long look and said, “Well, I guess it had to happen.” I took three of those twenty-five-cent sepia-toned, while-you-wait pictures of myself, posed the way “hipsters” wearing their zoots would “cool it”—hat dangled, knees drawn close together, feet wide apart, both index fingers jabbed toward the floor. The long coat and swinging chain and the Punjab pants were much more dramatic if you stood that way. One picture, I autographed and airmailed to my brothers and sisters in Lansing, to let them see how well I was doing. I gave another one to Ella, and the third to Shorty, who was really moved: I could tell by the way he said, “Thanks, Homeboy.” It was part of our “hip” code not to show that kind of affection.